12/14/2012 What is a home?

This coming Friday at the Ideas Cafe, we will be discussing what gives us a feeling of home.

What is the definition of home?

In its most basic sense, it is where we eat, sleep, rest, and store our belongings.

As we extend it from the physical to the emotional and psychological meaning, home is also where we have refuge from the weather, where we feel safe, where we can relax and let our guard down.

Home is where we grow our families, build memories and experiences.

Our hometown is a community that we are a part of, that we belong.

So far so good.

How do nomads define home?

In modern societies where we are expected to change our jobs many times during our career including almost continuous changing of our "home" locations, how do we feel "at home"?  Traveling salesman, military families, corporate troubleshooters, and many other occupations now require constant moving.  How do these families handle this?

One theory is that we are creatures of habit. Home provides the familiarity that we need in order to relax.  The sooner we accepts things as they are, the faster we become familiar with them and easier we are in adapting to new situations.

Does this make constant movers more flexible and accepting of differences?

Maybe the feeling of home is more a state of mind, how we can relax in our surroundings, how others can make us feel "at home". 

If we perceive threats from every direction, we will not feel at home.

Again we are faced with the balance of the two extremes. On the one hand we have the ever vigilant person ready to handle any threats wherever he is but he will likely never relax and feel at home even in his own house.  This person is likely a "survivor" who can live through more threats compared to the average person.

On the other hand, we have the person that can be considered "Pollyanna-ish", who is oblivious to the near misses that could have harmed him, but are relaxed much more often than the average person. He trust others freely, opening himself to possible harm but also connecting to a lot more friends and relationships.

How do we navigate between these two extremes while holding on to our precious worldly goods that gives us familiarity and comfort so that we can find home wherever we are, whichever community we are in?

Can we have multiple homes?

Why are we creatures of habit anyway?